This is my third FITC event (out of 6!) and there were many vendors at this year’s event – more than last I believe. A few new faces as well. Chumby (www.chumby.com) had an interesting product on display that is a WiFi devices that manages widgets. You can upload many different widgets to this portable device and access the data on WiFi. The device itself contains an LCD screen and is bean-bag like. I’m not sure if i would have any use for it, but it is a cool product nonetheless!
Critical Mass was a new face this year’s FITC and they are trying to get the word out about their company and what they do. Their most recent client is Rolex and they launched www.rolex.com in late January – impressive! I spoke with Julie and Joe from the event and they seem like really nice people who enjoy what they do. You can see more about their company www.criticalmass.com
I picked up a free design magazine that focused on web typography in the latest issue. Although I’m a web developer and a not a designer, I found this feature article eye-catchy (review to follow). There are a bunch of typography issues when working on the web and I’m interested to see what advice they have to offer.
Humber was there again, as they have always been in previous years (they are a sponsor of the event). I generally don’t go over to them, but their new program course guide caught my attention. They have a course starting in September of this year on Ajax. They currently have part 1 for beginner’s and part 2 for people who have been
programming in Ajax a little.
FITC was selling t-shirts, hats and other items with cool designs on the products. A new addition to this years even is a DVD that contains a pre-selected few of presenters. I’m still waiting for mine and hopefully it will come this coming week! The DVD itself is $50. I made sure to miss all the presenters that were on the DVD so that i could catch them later on - hopefully my plan will work as I missed some pretty good presenters!
I also talked to a girl over at Organic who was doing the same thing as Critical Mass. They were getting the word out about their company and opportunities for designer’s and developers. I believe her name was Lisa - nice girl!
Filed under: FITC on May 1st, 2007 | No Comments »
This man appeared to be from England given his witty nature and toilet humour! I had a blast at this presentation as it really let me be free from the stress of the real 
world and enjoy my professional a lot more.
He began by showing a few video clips of two race car drivers. As he was showing the clips, he was creating a very elaborate story to the clips. He said that this one guy kept losing to this other guy who was always getting first place. Not only that, but the guy in first place stole that losers wife and was sleeping with her. Not only does he have to bear that fact that he’s losing his first place spot but he also lost his wife.
Then he showed another clip of the cars all stopped at the end of a race. The one guy who kept losing got out of his car, ran up to the winner’s car and kicked in the windshield causing trauma to he man’s head. They get into a huge dispute and start fighting on the race track.
He then begins to tell us that the entire story was made up and that when he tells a story like that, his semi-good work becomes really interesting. Which absolutely worked!
Throughout the presentation he showed us progressions of his work and how he really started out. Most of his work contained a key element – humour.
He ended his presentation with quite a bang or “moan” I should say. I’m trying to keep this Blog for everyone, but it was pretty funny so I’m going to provide you link:
He brings truth to the work we do at the end – have fun with it. “we’re not surgeon’s or anything, so it doesn’t have to be serious all the time”. Point well made thanks for sharing Hoss!
www.flamjam.com
Filed under: Web Standards, FITC on April 28th, 2007 | No Comments »
Coming from a web development background, I still found this presentation to be useful and very inspiring. Tony takes on you on his journey from how the company started to how each individual project was broken down through its lifespan.
The work that he showed were either commercials or TV spots that incorporated 3D and real life cinematography.
It was very interesting to see how they would begin with a very bare 3D modelling of the commercial to get all the timing correct. Once that was in place, they would show the client so the client began to understand how the result was going to pan-out.
From there, they would replace the “dummy” 3D characters with real-life people. It must be tricky trying to match real-life cinematography with a virtual camera.
He gave examples such as the Zellers “Spring is in bloom” commercial (which I recall on TV!), Fruitopia (which was really fun) and Teletoon’s spots. Seeing this presentation makes me want to learn more about 3D and working on these types of projects – very cool!
Nonetheless, he had a lot of impressive work and I encourage you to check their website: www.4stroke.tv
Filed under: FITC, Creative, 3D on April 25th, 2007 | No Comments »
Red5 is one of the hottest open source projects that exist today! A perfect option for streaming audio or video and a great way to tap in to virtually any server-side API to create very powerful RIAs!
RED5 open source
Filed under: FITC, Flash on April 23rd, 2007 | No Comments »
